It appears that nothing changes over at Apple Legal. Yet again they are being sued, this time by a company called St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants. They claim that Apple's iPhone infringes on four digital camera patents that the company holds. The four include the ‘459, ‘219, ‘010 and ‘899 patents.

459: Take image contained within lens and store in some type of memory.
219: Display the picture that will be taken in some type of display window.
010: Push button in order to capture image.
899: Make images contained within some type of memory and make them viewable in some sort of digital camera roll.

While I am no legal expert, these patents sound utterly stupid to me. I mean, isn't this what every digital camera does. What I don't understand is how these even become patents in the first place. You'd think that something like this could be used against any number of digital photography products.

It appears St. Clair has been playing this game of patent infringement lawsuit for quite some time. In 2001, it sued Sony for infringing these same patents and won a $25 million judgement against the company. In 2003, it sued Canon and was awarded $34 million in damages. This just absolutely blows my mind. Not only are they playing this ridiculous game, they are actually winning! WTF!?

Since they've decided to play this game, St. Clair has filed suit against every major camera maker in the entire world including Fuji, Minolta, Kyocera, Nikon, Casio and Olympus. It also filed lawsuits against Samsung, Nokia, Panasonic, LG, Kodak, HP, Motorola, RIM and Palm, and the list goes on.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting really tired of this crap. This company can't even make it on it's own without stabbing every single company in the back and taking their moola.